The Girl by the River

by Sheila Jeffries

  What readers have to say about The Boy with no Boots

  ‘Stunning. Beautifully written, with an exquisitely poetic narrative’

  ‘One of those rare books that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it’

  ‘The most heart-warming book I have read in a long time. I did not want it to end’

  ‘Fabulous read’

  ‘One of the best books I have read. I couldn’t put it down’

  ‘Brilliant’

  ‘The prose is simply superb. When the sheer beauty of words can evoke tears, that’s the sign of a gifted writer’

  ‘Of all the books I have bought, this is the best’

  ‘I thought all the characters were brilliant’

  ‘A book to touch your heart’

  ‘Every page was a pleasure to read’

  ‘This novel is sweet and insightful and shows a good understanding of human emotions’

  ‘Spellbinding’

  ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it and the insight into the afterlife was so interesting’

  ‘Sheila Jeffries is an amazing storyteller’

  ‘A truly unique book, one that I would highly recommend. I can’t wait for her next’

  ‘Deep insight and understanding into the pain and fear many people live with. I heartily recommend this book to everyone who is tired of the violence and anger in so many books now’

  Also by Sheila Jeffries

  Solomon’s Tale

  Solomon’s Kitten

  The Boy with no Boots

  Timba Comes Home

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016

  A CBS company

  Copyright © Sheila Jeffries, 2016

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Sheila Jeffries to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-5492-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-5493-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Bembo by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd are committed to sourcing paper that is made from wood grown in sustainable forests and supports the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading international forest certification organisation. Our books displaying the FSC logo are printed on FSC certified paper.

  To the Earth Angels, with gratitude.

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART TWO

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1960

  Three o’clock. The chimes of the Hilbegut church clock cut through the heat haze that shimmered in the air. Above the village, on a south-facing hillside, the girl with the chestnut hair was watching the sunlight glint on a wafer-thin Gillette razorblade she held between finger and thumb. It winked and flashed, triumphantly, she thought: the sharp silver blade that was to bring her hated life to a glorious end.

  Her chestnut hair rippled around the girl’s bare shoulders. Red flowers burned in the grass, scarlet pimpernel and sheep sorrel. Red, red, soon to be joined by the red of her blood. She would lie down, and place her cut wrist on the springy turf, and let her life soak away into the earth she loved. Even the cushions of birds-foot-trefoil had flecks of red in their yellow petals. She wouldn’t look at her blood draining into the wiry grass. She’d turn her head away, and wait for sleep.

  A blue scabious flower nodded intrusively at her. She picked it and stared at the blaze of blue with a core of violet. It reminded her of her father’s eyes. Those eyes. They knew everything. Even stuff she didn’t want them to know. Just thinking about those eyes brought her father’s face before her, one of his unexpectedly wise remarks bobbing to the surface. ‘It’s not the big things that break us,’ Freddie had said to his youngest daughter, ‘it’s the little things.’

  The pain in his eyes, the memory of it, made her tighten her grip on the Gillette razorblade she had taken from his bathroom cupboard. She dropped the scabious flower and examined her wrist, the blue veins of it like rivers in the sand. One cut, one sleep, and it would be over, there on the blood-soaked hillside.

  The sudden, raw, stinging pain of the cut was shocking. Nauseous and trembling, she threw the red razorblade onto a patch of pink thyme. Light as a butterfly, it pitched there in the sun. Gasping with fear, she pressed her slashed wrist into the turf, and turned her head away. She’d done it. The burn of triumphant anger drained away, transmuted into a ringing silence. Regret dawned, fiercely, like the midsummer sun. The girl’s eyes gazed out across the land she loved, over the velvet greens of the Somerset Levels to the distant silk of the sea, the magic islands of the Bristol Channel and the Welsh mountains beyond. With love too bright and hate too dark, her mind cracked open like broken china. She let go, and let the waves of giddiness take her floating, the waves of her chestnut hair a drifting cloak of comfort.

  The butterfly arrived just as her eyes began to close. It was the last thing she saw as it pitched on her hand. She felt its delicate legs clinging to her skin. It sat attentively, its red and purple wings fanned out, its antennae glistening stiffly, its tiny pointed face watching her with blue-black eyes. Questioning her. Why?

  How had it come to this?

  PART ONE

  1945

  Chapter One

  1945

  ‘Why is Mummy screaming?’

  Freddie looked deep into the questioning eyes of the child on his lap. Then he looked away, gazing at the autumn sky outside the window. He tensed, watching a sparrowhawk hovering against wine-dark clouds. It came closer until he could see its cream throat and the beat of its brindled wings. The red of the rising sun glinted on its sharp claws. Level with the window, it glared in at Freddie, a clear, yellow chill of intention in its eye.

  ‘Daddy? Daddy, why is Mummy screaming?’ Three-year-old Lucy pinched the tweed sleeve of his jacket in her chubby hand. Freddie stroked the child’s white-blonde hair, letting a strand curl around his finger and marvelling at the rose freshness of her, the purity of her eyes in the dawn. He didn’t know how to answer her question. There was only the truth. And truth could hurt and frighten a young child.

  He had a go at distracting her. ‘Look at the big bird. A sparr
owhawk. See it? Down it goes – look!’ The sparrowhawk dived like a stone falling, and flew up, satisfied, with a tiny, rumpled sparrow cheeping in its claws.

  ‘Bad bird!’ said Lucy and turned her frightened eyes to look into his face. They both froze, and clung together, as the longest scream rang through the walls. It went on and on, and Freddie could hardly bear the way it echoed through his heart. He picked up Lucy and walked about with her, his feet tramping the brown lino floor, his voice whispering an assortment of desperate prayers to a God he wasn’t comfortable with. ‘Please, please, don’t let her die – please God – I need my Kate – I need her.’

  He was grateful for the way Lucy wound her soft little arms around his neck and clung to him until the screaming stopped and sunlight swept across the garden and through the square panes of the eastern windows. The silence was a moment when the colour of fear became an intense gold. Then the sky darkened over Monterose and a new cry soared above everything, like the sparrowhawk, a cry of challenge and anger.

  The cry pierced Freddie’s calm. In a moment of clarity he heard a message encrypted in that wild cry, and it said, ‘I’m BACK,’ and even as he raced up the stairs there was dread tangled with hope in his heart. What he had seen in a vision, years ago, in the eyes of a drowning woman. Pale blue eyes with a core of gold, like the sparrowhawk.

  ‘You can come in now, Freddie.’

  Dykie, the midwife, met him at the bedroom door, her wrinkled face looking up at him brightly, her papery cheeks flushed and smiling.

  ‘Is – is Kate all right?’ Freddie asked.

  Dykie searched his concerned eyes, shuffling the responses in her mind. ‘She’s tired – but she’ll get over it. It was –’ Dykie hesitated, then beamed reassuringly, ‘And you have a little girl, Freddie – another one – a sister for Lucy. How about that?’

  Secretly, Freddie had hoped for a boy, and he knew Kate had too. They’d chosen a name – Robert Levi. It had a ring to it – Robert Levi Barcussy. ‘Well,’ said Freddie. ‘Two little girls – I hope to God they don’t grow up to be nurses and school teachers.’

  Dykie laughed. ‘Come on – in you go – I’ll go down and tell Lucy she’s got a little sister.’

  Freddie pushed the bedroom door open a crack and peered in nervously. Kate was waiting for him with a radiant smile. As always, he was caught off guard by her beauty – the way her skin seemed luminous like the top of a church candle. The flame in her eyes drew him into the bedroom, their love nest with the red tasselled curtains, the colourful rag rugs Kate had made, and the picture of two Shire horses pulling a loaded hay cart against the sunset. On the deep window sill stood the stone angel with her sweet face and praying hands, Freddie’s first ever stone carving.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, dear,’ Kate beamed at him. ‘We’ve got a beautiful baby girl – and she’s big and healthy. I’m sorry I made all that fuss, dear. You must have been pacing the floor.’ She patted the damask bedspread which Dykie had smoothed and straightened to bring some order into the room. ‘It’s all right, dear, you can sit on the bed.’ Kate reached out and took his hand. She pulled it to her face and leaned her hot cheek against it. ‘I do love you, Freddie, more than anyone on earth. And I’ll soon be up and about again, cooking dinner and bossing you about.’

  Freddie wanted to smile, but his face felt rigid with the hours of anxiety. ‘Let’s look at the baby then,’ he said. He hadn’t told Kate how afraid he was that another baby would distract her from loving him with all her heart.

  He leaned over her to see the baby who was tightly wrapped in a shawl his mother had made. They both gazed at the tiny, crumpled face. ‘She’s sleeping,’ Kate said fondly, touching the baby’s brow with a caring finger, trying to smooth away the delicate furrow of a frown. ‘She’s already had a suck, and she’s really strong. We’re so blessed, Freddie. Two healthy little girls. Well . . . say something!’

  ‘Who does she look like?’ Freddie asked, and the baby girl opened her eyes right on cue and stared up at him. His blood ran cold. Pale blue eyes with a core of gold. He looked at Kate, and they both spoke at once. ‘Ethie!’

  There was a silence.

  Mesmerised by the baby’s gaze, Freddie offered a long calloused finger, ingrained with oil and stone dust. The baby grasped it and clung. It took Freddie’s breath away. This tiny being had claimed him. She had him forever. And she looked like Ethie.

  He remembered his vision of Ethie, years ago, long before she had been swept to her death by the Severn Bore. He’d seen her floating on her back in the speeding brown water, her hair twisting with the creamy curl of the foam, her eyes glaring a last glare, her blue lips forming words, ‘I’ll be back – I’ll be back.’

  ‘Penny for them?’ said Kate. Freddie’s silences were like green apples. They took a long time on the tree to get ripe, and when they did, the result was usually amazing, or funny or prophetic.

  ‘Well,’ Freddie hesitated, still feeling the powerful grip of that small fist around his finger. He looked into Kate’s amber brown eyes and saw the sunlight which was always in there like the view of a cottage garden from the stone archways of his fear. ‘I hope she won’t turn out like Ethie.’

  Kate looked determined. ‘Well, if she does, dear, then we must love her and support her. Ethie was a tormented soul. None of us understood what made her so difficult, but she had good in her too. She was clever, and deep – too deep for her own good, really. You’ll be a wonderful father, Freddie. You’re so good with Lucy.’

  ‘Ah. Maybe.’ Freddie felt a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. He tried to forget the sparrowhawk, and its menace. He knew it was gloomy thinking, like his mother. Fearful and negative. He didn’t want to be like that. Or like his father.

  ‘’Tis powerful,’ he said, ‘what we inherit from our parents. My old dad – he had a terrible temper – he’d smash every plate in the kitchen, and cry with shame. I vowed I would never be like him.’

  ‘And you aren’t,’ Kate said firmly.

  ‘I’m all right – with you in my life.’ Freddie put his other hand gently over Kate’s brow. Her hair felt damp, her skin hot.

  ‘Ooh, that’s lovely, lovely and cold,’ she said, and closed her eyes, soaking up the healing energy that came from Freddie’s large hand. He wouldn’t say so, but she knew what he was doing – sending her strength and peace in a way that came naturally to him. ‘You’re making me better.’

  Freddie glanced at the mound of Kate’s body under the quilt. ‘Is – is everything all right – down there?’ he asked. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, dear. Everything’s all right,’ Kate beamed at him and her smile flooded his world with light. Those words – ‘everything’s all right’, the way Kate said them with such assurance, had rescued him countless times from the maelstrom of anxiety that swirled around in his soul, dragging him into itself.

  Gently extracting his finger from the baby’s fist, Freddie went to the window. The sparrowhawk had gone, and cockerels were crowing all over Monterose. The smell of steam drifted through the open window from the station, and the sounds of shunting engines, shouting men, and people whistling as they rode down the street on creaking bicycles. One particular bicycle with high handlebars and a basket on the front was moving fast under the vigorously pedalling feet of a small, square woman who was riding it towards the house, her face shining like an apple.

  ‘Here’s your mother!’ said Freddie, and just stopped himself from reminding Kate that Sally, her mother, had been hoping for a boy.

  ‘She’ll be thrilled.’ Kate looked down fondly at the new baby girl. ‘You’re going to meet your granny.’

  ‘I gotta get to work,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Oh, stay for a minute, won’t you?’ implored Kate. ‘We must choose a name. And Lucy must see her little sister.’

  Dykie put her head round the door. ‘Lucy won’t come upstairs,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to force her. She seems a bit upset. I think she want
s her daddy.’

  Freddie ran downstairs, the money jingling in his pockets. He paused by the kitchen door, startled by the conversation going on between Lucy and Sally.

  ‘Mummy doesn’t like my baby sister,’ Lucy announced.

  ‘Course she does. All mummies love their babies,’ said Sally briskly.

  ‘But not THIS baby. She’s a bad baby.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Lucy. She can’t be a bad baby when she’s only just been born. There’s no such thing as a bad baby.’

  ‘I’m not being silly, Granny.’

  ‘Don’t you stamp your foot at me, young lady,’ said Sally. ‘Now come on. You come upstairs with Gran and we’ll see what we think of the new baby. You might like her!’

  ‘I won’t,’ Lucy muttered. She looked up and saw Freddie in the doorway. ‘I want Mummy. I want Mummy to come downstairs. I don’t want a baby sister. Baby sisters are bad.’

  Freddie nodded at Sally. ‘’Tis a girl,’ he said. ‘Strong as an ox, she is. You go up. I’ll take Lucy out in the garden.’

  ‘Is Kate all right?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Seems to be – yes – but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  Freddie hesitated. ‘It was – she had a bad time – worn her out.’

  Sally nodded. ‘She’ll get over it. You know Kate, always looking on the bright side.’

  Freddie picked up Lucy, who was clinging to his legs, and together they watched Sally bustling up the stairs proudly carrying a tiny yellow and white matinee set she had knitted for her new grandchild.

  Lucy rarely cried, but she did now, snuggled against Freddie’s shoulder. Freddie maintained a calming silence, his eyes waiting for the moment when Lucy would look up at him. Then he would send her his love, wordlessly, his big hand patting and stroking the child’s small, indignant back.

  ‘Where’s Granny Annie?’ sobbed Lucy, looking at the Bakery Cottage next door.

  ‘She’s still asleep,’ Freddie said quietly. ‘See, the curtains are closed. It’s early in the morning. Granny Annie can see the new baby later.’ He was glad he hadn’t woken Annie. She would have been worrying twice as much as he was, about the birth.